EP. 158: A HUMANIST APPROACH TO CHAPLAINCY
GREG EPSTEIN
Harvard’s humanist chaplain provides a nonreligious framework for meaning making and illustrates how technology has become a religion of its own.
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When a religious person is isolated from their community, whether due to hospitalization or military service, they can often rely on a chaplain for spiritual support. But where does a nonreligious person turn when facing the same circumstances? And what tools do they have for meaning making?
Our guest is Greg Epstein, humanist chaplain at Harvard and MIT and author of the New York Times bestselling book Good Without God. As a humanist chaplain, Greg has spent his career building ethical communities that are united around the idea that human sociality and interdependence are a sufficient foundation for a meaningful life. Greg’s writings have been published widely, including in TIME magazine and The Washington Post, and he is a prominent public speaker in humanist and interfaith communities.
In our conversation, Greg explains the role of a humanist chaplain, why a humanist chaplain is not necessarily an oxymoron, and how he guides individuals on their meaning-making journey. We discuss Greg’s candidate for the world’s most powerful word and a humanist’s argument for pursuing the work of healing over wealth. And finally, Greg walks us through the thesis of his most recent book Tech Agnostic – how technology has become a religion of its own, with a particular set of downsides.
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Greg Epstein is Harvard and MIT’s humanist chaplain – a professionally trained member of the clergy that supports the ethical and communal lives of nonreligious people. Greg has been described as “one of the top faith and moral leaders in the United States” by Faithful Internet, a project coordinated by the United Church of Christ with assistance from the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, for his efforts to bring together atheists, agnostics, and allies, as part of an ancient and ever-evolving ethical tradition that can be called humanism.
Greg strives to unite people over their shared humanity in the face of a changing world where faith can be difficult to sustain. His New York Times bestselling book Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe, helped popularize the notion that secular people can live purposeful, compassionate, and connected lives. His latest book Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World’s Most Powerful Religion was named 2024’s Book of the Year by the Porchlight Business Book Awards, in the “Big Ideas & New Perspectives” category; one of the best religion and spirituality books of 2024 by Religion News Service; and one of the best AI books of 2024 by the Artificiality Book Awards. His writings have been published widely, including in TIME, The Boston Globe, MIT Technology Review, CNN.com, The Washington Post, Popular Science, Nautilus, The Ink, and Big Think.
Greg is a prominent public speaker in humanist and interfaith communities and recently served a term as president of the Harvard Chaplains, Harvard University’s corps of over forty chaplains.
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In this episode, you’ll hear about:
2:30 - Mr Epstein’s personal definitions of ‘chaplain’ and ‘religion’
8:23 - How Mr. Epstein uses a humanist framework to guide meaning-making
24:35 - Is there an absolute ‘good’?
33:25 - The risks of technology as a religion
45:30 - Advice for medical professionals engaged in the work of healing while operating within a system built for profit
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Henry Bair: [00:00:01] Hi, I'm Henry Bair.
Tyler Johnson: [00:00:03] And I'm Tyler Johnson.Henry Bair: [00:00:04] And you're listening to The Doctor's Art, a podcast that explores meaning in medicine. Throughout our medical training and career, we have pondered what makes medicine meaningful. Can a stronger understanding of this meaning create better doctors? How can we build healthcare institutions that nurture the doctor patient connection? What can we learn about the human condition from accompanying our patients in times of suffering?
Tyler Johnson: [00:00:27] In seeking answers to these questions, we meet with deep thinkers working across healthcare, from doctors and nurses to patients and healthcare executives those who have collected a career's worth of hard earned wisdom probing the moral heart that beats at the core of medicine, we will hear stories that are by turns heartbreaking, amusing, inspiring, challenging, and enlightening. We welcome anyone curious about why doctors do what they do. Join us as we think out loud about what illness and healing can teach us about some of life's biggest Guest questions.
Tyler Johnson: [00:01:02] When a religious person is isolated from their community, whether due to hospitalization or military service, they can often rely on a chaplain for spiritual support. But where does a non-religious person turn when facing the same circumstances, and what tools do they have for meaning making? Our guest is Greg Epstein, humanist chaplain at Harvard and MIT and author of the New York Times best selling book Good Without God. As a humanist chaplain, Greg has spent his career building ethical communities that are united around the idea that human sociality and interdependence are a sufficient foundation for a meaningful life. Greg's writings have been published widely, including in time magazine and The Washington Post, and he is a prominent public speaker in humanist and interfaith communities. In our conversation, Greg explains the role of a humanist chaplain why a humanist chaplain is not necessarily an oxymoron and how he guides individuals on their meaning making journey. We discuss Greg's candidate for the world's most powerful word, and a humanist argument for pursuing the work of healing over wealth. And finally, Greg walks us through the thesis of his most recent book, Tech Agnostic How Technology Has Become a Religion of Its Own with a Particular Set of downsides.
Tyler Johnson: [00:02:21] Greg, thanks so much for taking the time to be with us, and welcome to the show.
Greg Epstein: [00:02:26] Thank you so much for having me.
Tyler Johnson: [00:02:28] So normally we start by having people kind of tell their personal story, and we are going to have you tell a story in a moment. But I think that because of the direction that I anticipate that the podcast is going to take and some of the questions that I think we're going to need to consider, I actually think that it might be helpful, first off, to have you just define some terms for us, because I think that those terms will those definitions will help us to maybe save us some time on the back end once we get into the meat of the conversation. So the first thing is, can you just tell us what is a chaplain and what does a chaplain do according to your understanding?
Greg Epstein: [00:03:05] Sure. A chaplain is typically a religious advisor, although and we'll get into this. Of course, I'm non-religious, so I'm somewhat of an exception to this rule, but increasingly less so. Chaplains are meant to be advisors in settings in which people cannot, as freely as they might otherwise like, attend their own chosen religious, spiritual or ethical community, congregation, etc. so settings like hospitals or healthcare settings, military prison settings, and also colleges and universities.
Tyler Johnson: [00:03:51] Okay. So then and again we'll get into the details of what this looks like for you specifically a little bit later on. But just before that, just for those of our listeners who because, you know, it's a funny thing, you would think one would think that, I mean, you know, I'm a doctor, I've worked in a hospital for a long time, and I've spent, I don't know, thousands, probably of hours in the same hospital. And there are chaplains who work in that hospital. And yet it is also true that the amount of time that I actually spend in the same room as the chaplain, especially in the same room as the chaplain, when the chaplain is sort of doing, you know, the primary stuff that a chaplain does is actually pretty astonishingly small. We do not overlap very much. And so even though most of the people who listen to this podcast are involved in healthcare and are probably sort of aware that chaplains are there, they may not really know, like if you just followed a chaplain, let's say you had a full time in-hospital chaplain and you followed them around all day. What is the majority of their time dedicated to doing?
Greg Epstein: [00:04:56] Well, actually, funnily enough, you know, I'm really not the best person to answer that question. I'm not a chaplain in a healthcare setting. I'm a chaplain in a higher ed setting, you know? So what I would say is that chaplains are there to listen. We're there to accompany. We're there to help people who wish to to make meaning. And, you know, there's a variety of ways to do that. I'm sort of an accidental chaplain in the sense that I never really had the aspiration to to have that title. What I did have was a really strong desire to work in a kind of community or clergy role, to help people think about big questions of meaning, purpose, philosophy, how we live our lives, how we come together with others to try to live better lives. And I figured out fairly early in my career that I wanted to do that in a non-religious way. And, you know, wasn't sure how one would go about that, but ultimately figured out how to go about it. And Harvard happened to have a humanist chaplaincy. It was one of the first institutions in the world to have such a thing. And so I just ended up here. Um, and that's why, like, I prefer to let the healthcare chaplains that really focus on that work speak for themselves. Sure.
Tyler Johnson: [00:06:23] We're going to come back to that journey that took you to where you are now and just one second. But before we do that, can you and I know that this is a, you know, one of those questions that is so broad that literally people write entire books on this question, but I'm still going to ask you to answer it in a relatively succinct way for the purposes of this discussion. What do you think is the definition of religion, and what does it mean specifically to be religious?
Greg Epstein: [00:06:47] Yeah. So I take that question on at the beginning of my new book, Tech Agnostic. There are two different kinds of definitions of that question. There is a scholarly definition of the term, which refers to the Latin term religio, which is to bind together. And it's sort of, you know, that which binds us together with our fellow human beings in a sort of rich and multifaceted way toward pursuing meaning and, you know, becoming what we are as human beings together. Right? You know, you could say it in any number of ways like that. In that definition, one does not necessarily need an idea of a god or a supernatural power or powers. It's enough to have a broader narrative about what it is to be human along with rituals, practices, communities that give flesh to the bones of that broader narrative. However, there's also a popular definition of religion, which you know does involve one or more supernatural powers, beings, etc. that does tend to have such things as before lives and or after lives, etc. and so, you know, whether one is religious or not, to me kind of depends on which definition one is using for the word.
Tyler Johnson: [00:08:23] Well, so now let's get back to your biography and your personal journey. So I alluded a few minutes ago to the fact that most doctors and health care professionals, I think, are at least aware that chaplains are there, right? They're aware that they function in the hospital and are available to help. And I think that if you even though you are a different kind of chaplain. I think that if you asked most people, including most healthcare workers, if you said, well, what what is a chaplain and what do they do, they would make some version of an answer that would say something like, well, when people are in a really hard healthcare setting, oftentimes their their thoughts turn to God or to, you know, ultimate reality or to ultimate questions or something along those lines. And a chaplain is a person who helps them connect with that divine source of strength. And ideally, it would be, you know, if the person who is very sick is Muslim, then you would have a muslim chaplain, and if they are Catholic, you would have a Catholic chaplain and so on. Which is just to say that I think for most people, the idea of chaplaincy, insofar as they understand it, is bound up inextricably with the idea of God and religion more along the lines of the second definition that you gave that involves some kind of a supernatural power. And so all of that is to say that I think the idea of a Humanistic or or even an agnostic or atheist chaplain for a lot of people would just seem like a contradiction in terms. So can you talk a little bit about both? How did you end up with a job that many people probably think doesn't exist? And what does that job look like for you? Like, how do you how do you do that job when the very way that you define it seems so paradox or would probably, I imagine, seem paradoxical to so many people.
Greg Epstein: [00:10:12] Yeah, I've been doing this kind of work for 20, 21 years now. And, you know, the oxymoron question, you know, has has always come up. And I didn't invent the role. And my predecessor and predecessors have been asked this question many times as well. And it's sort of, you know, my my short answer to it is if it is an oxymoron to say that you can believe passionately in human meaning and and purpose, and the pursuit thereof, and human compassion, and empathy, and the pursuit thereof, and and human community, based on the pursuit through reason as well as compassion of meaning and purpose. If it's an oxymoron to believe that you can do all of that without reference to a supernatural power or being or lives beyond this world, then I'm proud to be a walking oxymoron. I love the job. I love supporting people. There are always more people to support, more people who want support from a professional like myself, than I have hours in the day to support. And you know, I'm proud to be there for them. And it's fascinating work. And, you know, here I am walking oxymoron. But, you know, I mean, I guess to to that I would just add, I believe very passionately that, that people are meaning making and meaning seeking creatures.
Greg Epstein: [00:11:42] It's part of our evolution as humans. It's an earned trait if you can. If you think of it that way, metaphorically, I guess over the course of 4 billion plus years of the development of life here on this planet, which is a rock, you know, that that is orbiting, uh, a medium sized star in a sort of average ish corner of the universe, or I suppose the universe doesn't have corners. The universe that that was begun by the Big Bang. You know what, 14 plus billion years ago? What came before the Big Bang? The answer is, I don't know. And neither do you. And you know, I'm the stuff of exploded stars, right? Every every one of the trillions of interconnected cells in my body and yours are made up of carbon from stars that exploded billions of years ago. And, you know, as Carl Sagan liked to think and say, you know, we're we're the universe coming to know itself. And I think that's extraordinarily poignant, extraordinarily fascinating to think about. Extraordinarily meaningful, a source of hope, a source of comfort, a source of fascination, a source of questioning and mystery. And I believe that we can come together to support one another based on the kinds of conclusions about how to live that we might draw from, from that kind of worldview.
Greg Epstein: [00:13:09] And, you know, I think it's fascinating. One of the reasons I really wanted to speak with you and with your listeners is because I think that as far as my experience goes, medical professionals and doctors specifically tend to be secular at higher than the rate of the general population. You are taught so much about how the human body and mind work and where we came from in order to be able to heal us. You're taught so many secular ethical principles, like the Hippocratic Oath, that give tremendous meaning to life without reference to a deity. And I really honor that. I've always, you know, I've never thought I would ever be a doctor. I did have Jewish parents, you know, who who, you know, you'd think would have encouraged me. But no, they knew very well that I couldn't stand the sight of blood since I was, I don't know, 7 or 8 years old. But to walk alongside a profession like yours, and in some cases even people in your profession, and help people think about what is meaningful and what you know for them, and how to live who they want to be, etc.. I mean, that's that's a great privilege.
Tyler Johnson: [00:14:26] So let me ask a question that is sort of getting sideways at a point that you're starting to build toward in your last comment there. So for your job, being a chaplain for people who are studying in college or graduate degrees or whatever. And if I think about that, and if I imagine, you know, sort of the quintessential movie, especially for maybe 50 years ago, 40 or 50 years ago, about somebody who goes off to college. There's an old movie called Rudy, right, which is a movie about this kid from Nowheresville, Midwest. I don't even remember where he's from, who, you know, works his backside off, gets into Notre Dame and then gets onto the football team, even though he's, like five feet tall and, you know, has no football talent. But anyway, there is a see there's a series of scenes in that movie. He grew up Catholic. It's not really clear how religious he is per se, but he grew up Catholic. And you know, when he gets to these, like, he, you know, he works really hard in his classes and he works really hard in, you know, at the, at football and whatever. And that's all fine. And he sort of has coaches for all of those things. But when it comes to these kind of existential, defining moments, then he goes to the priest, right? He finds a priest in his whatever, the community college that he goes to, and then he finds one at Notre Dame. And that's kind of where he goes when he's trying to, as you alluded to earlier, trying to kind of, you know, fit his life into a larger narrative. Right, and is trying to answer questions about is it even worth it to, you know, work out to be on the football team when you have no talent? And anyway, that kind of stuff.
Tyler Johnson: [00:16:03] If you watch that movie and you look at those scenes, those scenes follow a pretty predictable script, right? Which is that the language that the priest uses is couched within a particular worldview. Right? It's it is he refers to God and God's will and what God wants for someone. And you know what God's plans are and all of those sorts of things, right? Well, all of which is to say that if you try to. Too. Like if I sat down with that script and then I tried to say, okay, now I'm going to try to take that script, but I'm going to try to sort of transliterate it into the version of this that would happen if he was going to see Meit's, secular humanism, chaplain or whatever. Right. I think for most people it would be hard to even know, like, where do you start? Because all the reference from the conversation, as we normally think about it, just aren't there. Right. There is no God. There is no plan. There is no any of that stuff. Right. Can you just walk us through if you have you know, I think many, many college students or whatever, uh, college is often the time when a person might experience what we would call their first existential crisis, right? Their sort of, why am I here? What am I doing with my life? What does this even all mean? If you have a person who comes to you with those kinds of questions, what is even the framing that you use to approach some of those larger philosophical questions if you don't have any of that traditionally religious framing to sort of fit things into.
Greg Epstein: [00:17:34] Very interesting question. Um, you know, at least for those of us who really care about these kinds of conversations, first of all, I've never I've never thought of myself as having any kind of script. And in fact, I love the idea that humanism, another term that we could potentially define is.
Tyler Johnson: [00:17:53] Why don't you, as long as we're there, what is humanism?
Greg Epstein: [00:17:56] Well, all right. So so I'm talking to people in my role as a chaplain from a humanist perspective. And so I would define humanism as a tradition, a way of life. You can call it a philosophy, although I like the idea that it's sort of a philosophy in action, that there's more of a, a lived and even communal component to humanism, although it's not particularly rigid about about any of that. That suggests that you can live an ethical life, a life of deep purpose and meaning, a life that contributes towards justice and and human flourishing for all, without reference to a supernatural power or being. That simply because we are social creatures, we need one another very much. We care about one another very much, and we have a lot of choices about how to live our what I believe is one and only life. Humanism is a way of thinking about, you know, how to how to live that life. And you know, you can sum it up in the three words that ended up as the title of my first book, Good Without God. And it's really, to me, it is essentially what, a billion or half a billion or hundreds of millions of non-religious people around the world actually do believe it's it's it's the idea that we learn from from ourselves and from one another about how to live well, how to do good, how to make this one and only world that we have better. And so I'm talking to people from a humanist perspective, and there's no script. There is no one plan that you have to live by that I have to live by that any of us have to live by. But we have evolved the ability that is as close to sacred as anything I can imagine.
Greg Epstein: [00:19:55] We've evolved this ability to choose for ourselves what we want to envision, the meaning of our lives to be, and how to go about putting that vision into practice. Right. And so when I sit with somebody, I mean, despite what I'm doing with you right now, I don't like to monologue. I'd like to listen as much as possible. I am an opportunity for somebody to come into an office or wherever we might go, go for a walk on the river. You know, sit down for some food or some some tea or whatever, and talk to me about what you think is meaningful in your life, where you're struggling to find meaning or to make meaning in your life. And, you know, we'll discuss what you might do about that. And I'm not going to tell you the plan, divine or otherwise, but I am going to maybe reflect back to you what you are saying about your own search for meaning for purpose, because it's a very difficult thing to build. Like we all have the ability to build it to one degree or another, but it's not easy, and I believe that people ought to have as much support as possible in this incredibly important pursuit, which is the pursuit of meaning in our lives. And often what society does with this pursuit is it just completely skips past it. You know, we're taught so much about how to do our jobs. We're taught so much about how to make money, about how to succeed. But how often do we get support, meaningful professional support in thinking about what the purpose and meaning of it all is? You know, thinking about what our why is in the face of all of these questions of how.
Tyler Johnson: [00:21:45] So I have a series of questions that I want to ask to understand a little bit more about those encounters. So the first one is, have you concluded that there is no God, or have you not yet reached a conclusion about whether there is a God or what God might be like if God existed?
Greg Epstein: [00:22:05] I have concluded that the concept of a God, and if we're talking about the sort of Judeo Christian, not that that's a great term either, but, um, you know, the the Western conceptions of God that more of your listeners may follow than.
Tyler Johnson: [00:22:24] The more common.
Greg Epstein: [00:22:25] Right. That those concepts are the most influential literary characters in the history of human civilization.
Tyler Johnson: [00:22:32] But you have concluded that they are literary characters and nothing more. I mean, I know I'm not saying that you're saying that your opinion is, you know, whatever, uh, normative on the universe, but but that's your conclusion.
Greg Epstein: [00:22:45] My opinion is just an opinion, but it is based on evidence that I've observed. Right? And so what I would simply do if somebody wanted to debate me on it, which actually people don't really seem to want to do all that often. But, you know, I suppose, you know, that's part of that's because I'm not really a passionate debater and, you know, so I don't accept many of these invitations, but if somebody wanted to debate me on it, I would say like, okay, well, let's compare the evidence that I've got for my conclusion to the evidence that you've got to your conclusion. And all I'm trying to prove in doing that comparison. Is that the evidence that I've got for my conclusion, which which is that God is a literary character that human beings created in order to project their own experiences onto external reality and to meet their own human needs. The evidence in favor of that conclusion is at least as solid as the evidence in favor of any other conclusion about a God, in my view, in my opinion. It's actually quite a bit more solid. But you know, that's okay if you disagree, because I have no interest in persuading people who are not already persuaded of this humanist view to adopt it. In fact, as a chaplain at Harvard, for example, for 21 years I've been very proudly signing something called a non proselytizing agreement, which is I will not, just like any other chaplain, would not attempt to persuade any member of my community that I serve who is not already persuaded of my worldview to adopt it. And I really like that because, you know, being a humanist is not necessary to be a good person or a good human being. And in fact, I've learned a lot about what it is to be a good person and a good human being from people who are not humanists in this way. And, you know, who were traditionally religious?
Tyler Johnson: [00:24:35] Sure. Okay. I want to ask two more questions about this. And then I want to shift gears a little bit, because I do want to talk about your your latest book as well. So but my second question on this line is, do you believe that there is such a thing as an ultimate capital G? Good. In other words, do you believe that there are some choices where in some absolute way there is a right choice and a wrong choice, and it is a better thing to choose the right choice?
Greg Epstein: [00:25:05] Look, I believe really strongly in caring for and loving other human beings I believe really strongly in the need to fight for justice and a just society. I believe incredibly strongly in the need for democracy and the rule of law and for education, because these are the things by which we bring about a society that's filled with love, compassion, cooperation, caring. And it's much better. It's a much better world with these things in it. And so, you know, the idea of an ultimate good, I mean, you know, it depends on the situation, of course. Right. Like, there are certain things there are certain situations you face where the choice is really difficult between, you know, like if I choose this thing or that thing, will we get to a better, more just, more compassionate, more loving society? There are other choices where it's just an absolutely easy slam dunk of a choice. Sure. And so, you know, I think that that's what we're getting at, really. It's like it's like we're getting at the question of In these really easy slam dunk, you know, situations, right. The kill or don't kill the you know the abuser don't abuse the exploit or don't exploit. You know, is there some sort of absolute good. And the answer, for all intents and purposes is yes. But you know, not because, you know, the lightning bolt came from the heavens and told us all so, but more because we care so much about ourselves and one another that, you know, we're absolutely obligated to do the right thing in these kinds of stark situations.
Tyler Johnson: [00:26:54] And I'm curious then, in your personal counseling. So I do a lot of counseling. Uh, like, I'm one of the primary mentors in our medical school. So I have a cohort of students every year. Yeah, they're sort of my longitudinal mentees. So I meet with them in various settings, on and off, for at least four years if they graduate. And, you know, sometimes it's as many as 8 or 10 if they do an MD and a PhD and whatever. And those longitudinal relationships are, you know, one of the most substantive and beautiful parts of my job. So I'm imagining, for example, a person who comes to you and says, look, I'm partway through medical school and I'm looking at, you know, different options of what I can do when I grow up. And on the one hand, there's a part of me that feels really drawn to a career in, you know, actual clinical medicine because I feel this, you know, sort of draw to help heal humanity and anyway, etc. you can imagine the rest of that side of the conversation. But then, on the other hand, I also feel, you know, I got connected through these various things. This happens as much as you might expect here in Silicon Valley with this consulting company. And if I go work with them, I'm not. I won't even do residency, so I won't have any, you know, patient contact.
Tyler Johnson: [00:28:14] I won't participate in clinical medicine anymore. But I you know, they've told me straight out, I can make my first million before I'm 35 and my first 10 million before I'm 45. Right. So I'm curious, you know, just being honest for a minute in my way of seeing things, a person who is smart enough and talented enough and driven enough and whatever to be in medical school, you know, that says something about sort of the gifts that they have to offer the world. And of course, there's a bunch of caveats about investors can do a lot of good and yada yada. But I'm just if you take it on face value, right? In my mind, the world is more likely to be better off in the final summation of things. If that person goes into clinical medicine and they make a difference there, than if they go into a job where they'll make a lot of money. And that's really the primary reason for going into the job is to make a lot of money. So I'm curious, in a in a setting like that, whatever it might look like in your neck of the woods. Would you feel comfortable nudging the person towards a decision that you're convinced would ultimately work more towards the, you know, ends of compassion and kindness and whatever, as opposed to the ends of just making money or what have you?
Greg Epstein: [00:29:25] Well, first of all, I mean, I would say that I'm with you in the sense that I, I would agree that the world needs more healers than it needs consultants. It needs more people who take on a kind of, you know, in in what my case would be, or the case of doctors who might be in my community, a kind of secularly sacred obligation to try to uplift human life and lives more than it needs, you know, people who are trying to grow Silicon Valley startups. I don't think that it's an absolute thing in the sense that, you know, I think the consequences of setting up an economy or a country where, you know, that fact would just sort of assign people and they'd have no choice in the matter and their particular circumstances wouldn't, wouldn't matter, you know, probably cause more harm than good. And I say that to you as somebody whose mother was a child refugee from Cuba. Right. And, you know, saw early on in my life the harms of a communist, dictatorial takeover, although I also saw the harms of the trauma that were that was inflicted upon my mom by, you know, the United States and its imperial power. You know, it deigned to admit her for various reasons, but kept her in foster care for more than two years while her parents and her sister waited to, you know, for for their permission to come.
Greg Epstein: [00:30:55] And so, you know, I've seen these these questions cut both ways. Right. But I guess what I would say is that my role in these kinds of conversations and it has come up, has often been to try to put these young people weighing these kinds of choices together in a room with one another, where what they have the opportunity to do is connect with one another and really talk deeply in a confidential way about what they think their lives are for, who do they want to be, and how they want to live openly and vulnerably, where they get to talk about the fears that they have, the sadness that they have, the the anger that they have about the the hard parts of being human, all of those hard parts and talk about what honestly and really brings them joy and happiness, you know, and then support one another in the process of doing that. Because I think what that accomplishes is it gives some of these students a sense that there really is more to life than just profits and success. Which, you know, it's not their fault that that is honestly what they've been taught to kind of idolize for, for much of their lives to this point.
Greg Epstein: [00:32:17] If you don't believe in a traditional God, you often do find yourself believing in the God of economics, the God of money, the invisible hand of the market, that sort of thing. Uh, you know, and now, by the way, increasingly, the gods of technology, I suppose we'll get to that. So I want these young people young, I call them young leaders. I would just call them, you know, young gifted people, gifted not necessarily so much by the universe, but like, honestly, like society before they were born came to them almost like baby Jesus and gave them a lot of gifts. And now they're the product of of having grown up with those gifts. And are they going to give those gifts back, or are they just going to continue to pursue more and more gifts? I want them to make that decision in the company of other young people who are who are thoughtful, sensitive, and who are sincerely trying to figure out what their life is going to be for. And I think, you know, when you do that, a lot of times they make good, healthy decisions.
Tyler Johnson: [00:33:25] So first, you started by making your life or your profession a provocative argument in and of itself, in the sense that you're this, you know, uh, oxymoron that we talked about earlier, you sort of embody this oxymoronic impulse. But then more recently now, you have explicitly been making another provocative argument in the sense that you have talked about how you believe that technology has become its own form of religion and that certain technological Interfaces or objects or whatever have effectively become the 21st century's gods. Even though we almost never talk about them in that way or acknowledge them as such. So can you just briefly outline for us? Why do you think that quote unquote technology deserves that kind of pretty charged language to describe it?
Greg Epstein: [00:34:21] Yeah. So this this comes after about 14 or 15 years serving as a chaplain at Harvard. I was offered the opportunity to join MIT as well. And I'd been floated a similar possibility a few years earlier. But I figured I'm already serving one big, rich university. Why two? I was, at that point, earlier point, really engaged in the project of trying to build a kind of alternative experimental congregation or community for what we called atheists, agnostics and allies. It met not only every week, but it met practically every day. It had its own space. It had its own staff. I mean, you know, it had things for kids. It had, uh, things for families. It had, uh, meditation, storytelling, community service, the whole thing. And yet by that point, 2018 now is when I was given the offer to join MIT. Thinking to myself, I don't know, is that is the congregational model. The way that I want to live my life is, you know, I was seeing congregations, um, run by my religious friends and peers struggle as well. And, you know, my congregation, uh, had been successful in the sense that we'd raised a lot of money and we had a lot of people that were coming, many dozens of which were were coming just about every week, multiple times a week, and were really involved. But it was this sense of like, um, yeah, but is this model. What's really going to work in the world of the 21st century. Is this the thing that is going to bring the world closer together? Which is what I would have said I wanted to do, but I didn't pick that phrase bring the world closer together.
Greg Epstein: [00:36:08] I didn't invent it. That's actually Mark Zuckerberg's phrase in 2017. Mark Zuckerberg was, I think, really fascinated with the idea that his new social media institution, then Facebook, now meta, was reinventing the ways in which people come together for community. Of course, now they've completely ditched and trashed that idea, and they've moved on to, you know, AI that's stealing all the books and all the literature and all the art and whatever. But, you know, I digress for a moment. So, you know, I thought about how even for the young people and all sorts of people who were attending this congregation that I was running, that I had founded or co-founded, that our whole sense of what what it was to be community had completely changed because of what you call Silicon Valley tech or big tech. You know, it was a kind of new congregational model that that was dominating how we were interacting with one another. And I, you know, started thinking like, oh, that's interesting. You know, all this training that I have through Harvard Divinity School and other great institutions, I'm also ordained as something called a secular humanist rabbi. And I had five years of really great training through that, you know, and yet I was trained in how people have historically come together that religion was I was taught the most powerful social technology ever created.
Greg Epstein: [00:37:36] And I believed that for a long time. But it was the realization in around 2018, 2019 or so that I don't think that's actually true anymore. I think that this thing that we now just call tech has become the world's most powerful social technology. And, you know, started thinking like, oh, are there any other ways in which this Silicon Valley thing, uh, this mythical realm, of course, sort of like Valhalla or Heaven that, you know, that has no borders or mayor or laws, you know, are there any other ways in which this thing seems to resemble religion? And I started making a list of of the ways that it does, and I've never stopped making that list. There's just so many points of comparison. And, you know, to me, the biggest takeaway that I would want an audience of doctors to get from this. And by the way, the first chapter of the book, I introduced the concept. And then chapter one is sort of a long chapter that centers on the story of a student that I worked with for a couple of years intensively while I was at Harvard, and so was he. And this student has a medical degree as an MD as well as an MBA. Works in both practice of medicine and in venture capital in biomedical ethics. The name that the student is referred to by in the book is Javon. It's a pseudonym to protect a couple family members, but essentially a student had come as close as one can come in America to, I would say, switching castes.
Greg Epstein: [00:39:17] This was a student who, growing up, was raised by a great aunt because both parents had been teens who were addicted and either died or were ill or whatever. And, you know, basically somebody who had nothing and goes on to all those degrees the undergraduate, the MD, the MBA, they're all from either Harvard or Stanford. And that's true, by the way. That's not that's not adjusted. And the This student comes to me and says, listen, I've been as successful as as I think I could be at this point. I'm working with the titans of these industries. I'm working in these elite, elite institutions, and it's just unbelievable to me that I'm here. But the problem is, I don't think I know how to be happy, and I can't figure out why. Any chance we could talk about that? And the whole chapter is a chapter analyzing the concept of if tech is a religion, what is its theology? The chapter centers around the story of this young person, this young doctor, Javon. The short answer is like the theology is is the hockey stick graph is a symbol of the tech theology that if you apply enough technology, enough of a technological mindset to something, then your profits will go infinitely upward. Right? To ascend to a kind of economic heaven. There is this invisible hand of the marketplace that guides our lives, our world, our society, our future, etc.
Greg Epstein: [00:40:59] but I would love it if folks would read beyond that, because the story that this young man has to tell about why he hasn't been able to feel happy with all of his success is an incredibly powerful story, and it sort of leads to the unfolding of the rest of the book, which is this idea that tech is the sort of centerpiece of a lot of our lives and a lot of our livelihoods these days. And I'm not even saying that we need to abolish that. I'm not saying that we need to, you know, destroy all our, you know, all our tech, smash all our screens. I'm just saying that if we're going to be so devoted to the pursuit of this stuff, ought we not to reform it such that it's actually there to serve us and not vice versa. That's what I'm trying to say. That's the realization that I think a Javon ultimately comes to. That's the kind of thing that I'd want a young medical student or doctor to grapple with is like, am I serving medicine? Or is medicine serving me? You know, is the sort of biomedical tech that I could help design. Is it really for all of humanity, or is it primarily benefiting the wealthiest human beings to have ever walked the earth thus far? If it's the former, great. You know, maybe you do have some unique leverage there, but if it's the latter, what are we doing? And isn't there a better way to live?
Tyler Johnson: [00:42:32] Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, it's funny because we haven't gotten into this because this podcast is about you, not me. But I'm a deeply religious person and have served as a sort of.
Greg Epstein: [00:42:42] I think I picked that up. Yeah. Good question.
Tyler Johnson: [00:42:45] I've served as a kind of a lay pastor or not exactly a chaplain, but something sort of like that on campus. The one thing that I will say is that the way that I think that you and I though are religious conclusions may be very different. I think the way that we are similar is that we both agree that these questions really matter, and that the best way to approach them is thoughtfully and transparently. Right. That this is something that is worth our conscious reflection. Right. And I think that I very much agree with you that the thing that really that worries me the most about both 21st century culture in general to some degree, but especially about the technological revolution, is that it wants, in effect, to have it both ways, in the sense that it wants to Become a totalizing force, even if they don't use that word right? It wants to do everything from influence, the information that comes into our brains through, you know, sort of guiding algorithmic feeds that come into our social media and whatever through deciding what things we actually see and don't see and what stuff gets promoted in the algorithm versus demoted. It wants to have all of that sort of a power, but it doesn't like talking about it. It doesn't like acknowledging the transformational role that it's playing. Right. And I think that if someone comes to you and says, hey, you know, I'm in the midst of making this really fraught decision and I want to talk about how do I make this decision, what should I think about, what should I be weighing? You can do that.
Tyler Johnson: [00:44:32] And they may agree with you or disagree with you, but you have a discussion about it, right? It is thoughtful and transparent. Whereas so much of technology has become so ubiquitous and so baked into the way that we experience reality. Now that we, I think, have functionally ceded a lot of the control and authority of our lives. As you correctly stated, effectively, if indirectly, over to people whose only stake in the game is to make more money. Right. And we end up ceding much of the most valuable existential real estate in our hearts and our minds over to people who do not care about us as individuals at all, but whose only impetus is to make more money. And that strikes me as an incredibly dangerous state of affairs. Right. An incredibly dangerous way of of approaching that.
Tyler Johnson: [00:45:30] But I do want to ask you a question, because we like to end usually on a sort of a very practical question. And I think this is really important. You know, one of the things that is true for people, I think for fully fledged doctors, but especially for doctors in training, is that they are just so busy and they're often so tired that it can feel like the last thing that they could do, you know, that they can do is try to take on some grand philosophical project in their lives.
Tyler Johnson: [00:45:58] Right? They're just trying to make sure they eat and go to the bathroom while they're like going through their training. So if there were someone who listened to or your critique of technology or read the book about the current state of technology, and it really resonated with them and they thought, well, yeah, like that. Gosh, now that I think about it, that really is true. It's like my, you know, my iPhone has become my God. And, you know, social media and whatever have become my religion. But in the midst of a super busy life and I can't, you know, pull a Henry David Thoreau and go move to Walden Pond in the middle of my urology residency or whatever. Like what would you recommend as sort of concrete next steps that a person who is in the middle of a super busy, consuming part of their life could do to try to reclaim some of that control, to try to take back some of the authority, their own moral authority, over kind of the existential direction of their life.
Greg Epstein: [00:46:52] First of all, thank you, Tyler. Um, not just for the great final question, but for a great conversation. And I would say, you know, I don't think that this podcast is about me. I think it is about us. It's about the kind of interfaith dialog that a conversation like this represents. But it's also about, you know, the the royal we. I gave a talk many years ago in my congregation that I titled The Most Powerful Word in the world, and I left people kind of hanging for a week of, you know, what word was I referring to? And, you know, it was fun to watch people guess. But the word that I chose as the most powerful word in the world is we. Because who we choose to define as our we makes an enormous difference in in how we see just about everything. And so, you know, it's I think it is people like you and, and me, uh, coming together despite theological differences, distance, etc.. Uh, different professions and experiences to say, hey, we are concerned about this. This is this is a human issue that that we need to grapple with. You know, so what I would say is you're right. You know, first of all, if you're a medical student or a new doctor adapting to your new reality as a doctor, or even if you're somebody you know, more experienced in your career, but you've just been realizing lately how unsustainable some of these careers can feel, because there are those two, right? You know, there are people who push themselves for 30, 40, 50 years and then hit a point, sometimes in a positive way, where they realize like, what am I doing? How, how can I keep working this hard? Isn't there more to life? Don't I need more to give to to have for my family, for the world, etc.? Right. And so what I you know, I don't have all the answers. I'm, you know, humanism is a nonprofit organization.
Tyler Johnson: [00:48:50] We were actually going to title the episode The Humanist with all the answers. So now you kind of spoiled our title, but, you know, whatever.
Greg Epstein: [00:48:58] Um, all right. Well, you know, it won't be the first time that I've been a victim of false advertising. But anyway, so what I would say is that, first of all, have compassion for yourself, that you did not create this system. You did not invent the idea that in order to be a healer, you have to work 80 or 90 or 100 hours a week. That was created by what? Um, the writer Tema Okun calls white supremacy culture in an article. A famous article about what white supremacy culture is that that identifies perfectionism as one of the features of a society that is devoted to the domination of some by others. And if it wasn't for this idea that we wanted to live in a society, you know, we meaning people long before us wanted to live in a society in which certain people's lives were made more comfortable by the work of others. We wouldn't have designed a system in which you now have to work so hard. There would be more doctors, and we could take more time for ourselves and for one another, but then that wouldn't be so conducive to the idea of, you know, overwhelming excellence in having people be the best of the best, which sort of reinforces our self-esteem in ways that we feel are necessary, because the ways in which our society is organized, so is so good at tearing down our self-esteem that we then need to reinforce ourselves by telling us like, look, I'm the best.
Greg Epstein: [00:50:35] Look how hard I work. I mean, it's Puritanism, pure and simple. It's a secular, technological medical Puritanism, pure and simple. And that appears in the same chapter with the story of Javon, uh, in my book Tech Agnostic. But anyway, I would then say, just look at the at the use of tech, for example. I thought for many years that I was addicted to tech, and I even was maybe the first person or one of the first people to write about tech addiction. But what I ultimately concluded was that tech is a little different than an addiction. Because if you were to say to a person using tech, uh, what you might say to somebody using an illegal drug, you know, a psychoactive substance, which is, you know, maybe quit cold turkey, right? It's an absurd statement. You know, no person living listening to this podcast could ever imagine or should ever have to imagine just going cold turkey from tech, or even from the sort of social media kind of technology, right? It's not going to work for you in your life.
Greg Epstein: [00:51:47] It certainly ain't going to work for me either. So I started to think, well, what? What is it then? I mean, I felt so addicted to it. I wrote about my formal treatment for tech addiction in my first book, Good Without God, which came out in 2009. The doctor that I mentioned earlier, Doctor Joe Gerstein, he founded an international network of addiction recovery meetings through his work at Harvard Medical School called Smart Recovery. That's, you know, sort of addiction recovery based on secular scientific medical principles. And I attended some of these meetings, and I told them about my addiction and my email and web browsing of like, news sites and such. And they laughed at me. But, you know, I, I talked about it and realized like, yeah, okay. You know, actually I could use some of the same principles that they were using to ease my own burden. But I ended up for this book, Tech Agnostic Talking to eating disorder experts. Because, you know, if you have an eating disorder.
Tyler Johnson: [00:52:45] You have to eat.
Greg Epstein: [00:52:46] You have to eat, right? You know, and you don't even want to just, like, eat the right food but hate yourself the whole time. You want to transform your relationship with the food such that you have a positive relationship.
Tyler Johnson: [00:52:58] Right?
Greg Epstein: [00:52:58] Sure, exactly.
Tyler Johnson: [00:52:59] And so you enjoy it.
Greg Epstein: [00:53:00] Yes. And so what I would say to you about tech is ask yourself whether you do read this book or not, as you're interacting with tech as, as you, you know, one more and another and another more our, you know, devoted to your tech. Am I behaving a little bit religiously right now? If this tech were my religion, would I be a fundamentalist right now? You know, could I be a little more skeptical? Could I be a little bit more reformed, a little bit more liberal in my in my use of this stuff? Isn't there something else that I might devote some of this time and energy to? And if you just ask yourself that kind of critical question, if you're if you're willing to be the kid at the back of the Sunday school class who's a little bit critical, whether you're an agnostic or an atheist or just a liberal believer in in this new faith, I think it'll be really good. I think that, you know, you've got wisdom, you've got critical thinking. It's fine if you use some tech, it's fine if you use a lot of tech. But are you living your life the way that you want to live as a human being? Are you living your life in deep connection with other human beings? If not, something seems to have gone wrong somewhere along the line, and maybe it's okay for you to wonder about that more.
Tyler Johnson: [00:54:20] Yeah, I think that reorientation of tech, that is always the irony, right? We invent tech to serve our needs and end up so often serving tech's needs. And that has always been the case since there was technology, except that in this particular case, this technology has a certain kind of superpower which can be for good or for ill, right? And that's the problem, is that serving this tech is not the same thing as serving, you know, the radio a hundred years ago or serving the railroad 50 years before that.
Greg Epstein: [00:54:53] Far more devoted to this stuff than we were to that. It's far more totalitarian in its influence than.
Tyler Johnson: [00:54:59] There is a zealotry, if you will, or, as you put it, a fundamental.
Greg Epstein: [00:55:03] Yeah. You know, and I would just say that religion has a sort of similarity to it, which is that, you know, the idea is religion's, in my view, were invented for other people. They would say, you know, maybe some religions were invented, others were, you know, are true and real. But in either case, you know, you've got this idea that the religion can be for good. But, you know, even my most devoted believing religious colleagues tend to freely admit that there's a lot of people who get the religion you know wrong and who devote, you know, who end up living their lives in a way that they're devoted. You know, that their devotion is to a superficial version of the god. Right? Yeah. And so or to themselves. A lot a lot of similarities is all I'm saying. You know, it's that that, you know, whether it's the tech religion or the religion, religion or some other secular thing, a lot of us, you know, end up finding ourselves devoted to something that's really not worthy of our devotion. And it takes a big person to to make a turn. But I'm proud to work in a supporting role for people who are trying to make that turn. I find myself often having to to reorient and turn around myself. And you know, that's being human for you. You know, we're constantly having to reevaluate, like, am I living the way that I want to live? You know, is is the way that I'm living sustainable for all people? And if not, like, what could we do to make it more so? That's a conversation that I think we need to have on your behalf, because you do have to work too hard, but it's also a conversation in which we desperately need you to be involved because, you know, you have a lot of the answers. You have a lot of the tools you're so desperately needed in this world. We're counting on you, and we need the best example that you can offer.
Tyler Johnson: [00:56:58] Well, Greg, you have been so generous with your time. I feel like chaplains and doctors, though, they do very different things in one sense. In another sense, the professions, I think, spring largely from the same moral impetus, and we really appreciate all of the good thinking and writing that you have done and all of the good interpersonal work that you do there on the ground. And we really appreciate you being willing to spend so much time with us on the show. And thank you for being with us.
Henry Bair: [00:57:29] Thank you for joining our conversation on this week's episode of The Doctor's Art. You can find program notes and transcripts of all episodes at the Doctor's Art.com. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe, rate, and review our show available for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Tyler Johnson: [00:57:48] We also encourage you to share the podcast with any friends or colleagues who you think might enjoy the program. And if you know of a doctor, patient, or anyone working in health care who would love to explore meaning in medicine with us on the show, feel free to leave a suggestion in the comments.
Henry Bair: [00:58:02] I'm Henry Bair.
Tyler Johnson: [00:58:03] And I'm Tyler Johnson. We hope you can join us next time. Until then, be well.
